Beloved in the Bay Area as the music director of San Francisco Opera from 1992–2009, Donald Runnicles has spent his summers at the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming since 2005 — the festival’s orchestra is made up of around 250 pros circulating in and out on a working holiday.
This combination of leadership and talent has been displayed on a series of annual festival samplers, but the audiophile label Reference Recordings is trying to document something more substantial — first with a Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle featuring pianist Garrick Ohlsson, and now with Mahler’s mighty Fifth Symphony, recorded in 2024.
The question is, as always, does the world need another Mahler Fifth?
This one strikes me as a middle-of-the-road interpretation — not quite Viennese gemütlichkeit, not quite neurotic angst and ecstasy à la Leonard Bernstein or Klaus Tennstedt. The violent contrasts in the two opening movements are minimized at somewhat broad tempos while remaining faithful to almost all of the markings and speed adjustments. This approach tends to drag down the central scherzo, which isn’t held together as well as it could be.
Likewise, the Adagietto — now famous on stage and screens — straddles the middle ground at ten minutes between a love song to Alma Mahler on the fast end and a funeral elegy for dead heroes on the slow end. While the strings do dig in hard, it takes a while for them to make it happen.
The SACD’s 5.1 surround sonics seem rolled off a bit on the high end, yet the recording still captures an astonishing amount of detail. The engineering really scores big in the fantastically contrapuntal finale, where every strand in the texture is clear and bold. Here, it helps that Runnicles doesn’t race madly through, taking his time and letting all of that detail bloom.
One an orchestra member familiar to Los Angeles Philharmonic fans. That’s the Phil’s golden-toned principal trumpet Thomas Hooten sounding the initial funeral fanfares and solos throughout the first movement as flawlessly as you’ll ever hear in L.A. Also, Gail Williams excels in the scherzo’s horn solos.
As a souvenir of what must be a magical experience in the mountains, this serves nicely. But I wouldn’t place it in the top tier of go-to Mahler 5s.
